The casual TW user venturing into js macros does not have 'developer tools', so yes the popups are a pain, and I agree that TW is not a good development environment. But for really simple macros, once you have learned the main pitfalls, it's simple enough to add real value with some loops or numerical calculations etc, without the need for development tools.
I would also agree that people on the forum are not typical, and much more likely to have programming skills than the general computer-using population. However, I would argue that this also applies to a large majority of potential TW users. Yes, anyone can 'consume' a TW in the sense of using it like a website, and they can maybe create some tiddlers with cross-links. But going beyond that to learn about widgets, transclusion, macros, etc is *hard*. My view is that people who don't either have programming skills, or at least the aptitude for programming are never going to get very far with this. Hence my view that a good proportion of people that *have *got that far, would benefit from having additional tools at their disposal to do things that are quite simple, but not possible with core TW. Stephen: I thought your new user trials were interesting, but the main lesson that I took from it was not that the new user experience was not good enough (though that is indeed true), but rather, that TW is not for everyone. It is a powerful tool for people with the skills and inclination to use it, but most people are probably not even going to see the point of it, let alone be able to use it in a meaningful way. I can see the argument that adding yet another element to the tools within tiddlywiki.com could add to the confusion, but this confusion is pretty severe anyway, and would be better addressed by restructuring the introductory information rather than by hiding something that I would view as essential for certain types of task. At the moment, the information is structured in the form 'these are the features; this is how they work'. The big thing that is missing in my view, is a description of what the features are *for*. The hardest thing in learning to drive TW is to know what tool to use for a given task. If there were a summary describing what role each of the features played in creating a dynamic wiki, then there would be a natural gap that would be filled by js macros (and other js features, no doubt - I haven't got that far), namely for performing more programatic or numerical operations. Given such a summary, then at least people would know *when* the move to js would be necessary, even if that information is kept in the dev area. I wasted a fair bit of time trying to imagine crazy ways of doing things with the core that it wasn't designed for (eg numeric operations by ordering and filtering a set of tiddlers that represent different numbers...!), while not really even understanding the functional difference between macros and widgets. Cheers, Neil. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywiki. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
